No “We” Can’t

Thomas L. Friedman’s latest column, one of his mock memos, damn near ruined my Sunday. Here’s how it starts:

TO Barack Obama, John Boehner, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi and Eric Cantor, I just have two words of advice: Herbert Hoover.

I know you’re all familiar with that name. Hoover lives in infamy in U.S. history for having been on duty when the Great Depression happened. You’re all courting a similar fate….

But unlike Hoover, who was just practicing the conventional economic wisdom of his day when we fell into the Depression, you have no excuses. We know what to do—a Grand Bargain: short-term stimulus to ease us through this deleveraging process, debt restructuring in the housing market and long-term budget-cutting to put our fiscal house in order. None of this is easy….

Then a few grafs about how “both parties” aren’t trying hard enough to compromise and how “our leadership” is “out of its mind” and how you, Obama, and you, Boehner, are equally bad because you “walked away from your negotiations” and then “retreated to your bases” instead of doing what you should have done, which was to have “taken the issue to the country and not let up until the other guy came back to the table.”

Hang on, isn’t that exactly what Obama, for his part, is doing right now? Taking the issue to the country? Not to his “base”—not to Marin County or the Upper West Side or Hyde Park—but to the other guy’s, to Cantor’s district and Boehner’s state?

Oh, never mind. Friedman doesn’t really want the President to take it to the country. He wants the President to take it to the country retreat:

If the president really wants to lead from the front, he should summon the Democratic and Republican leadership, along with all 12 members of the House-Senate deficit “supercommittee,” to join him at Camp David and tell the world that they are not coming back without a Grand Bargain—one that offers some short-term jobs stimulus, a credible long-term debt reduction plan with entitlement cuts and tax reform that increases revenues.

I’ll get to the substantive obtuseness of this in a moment, but first let’s consider the logistical practicalities. How likely is it that the Republican congressional leadership—which contemptuously refused a Presidential request to address a joint session on the day of his choosing—will agree to pack their bags and move to Camp David, dragging their six supercommittee appointees with them, for an open-ended, presumably unlimited period of time? Why would they promise to stay there for however many days, weeks, or months it takes to conclude a “Grand Bargain” (or forever, whichever comes first)? How is Obama supposed to keep them there if they decide it would be just the thing to humiliate him by leaving, with the explanation that the President’s insistence on “punishing job creators” was making agreement impossible? What is Obama supposed to do then? Have them arrested? Or just steel himself for the commentariat to jeer that Obama’s big Camp David confab has ended up being like the worst of Jimmy Carter’s—the Camp David malaise without the Camp David accords?

What’s really infuriating about this Friedman fantasia, though, is the stuff I’ve boldfaced above. “We know what to do,” he writes. But who’s this “we”?

Well, “we” are those who “know” that what’s needed are (1) short-term stimulus—i.e., a bigger deficit this year, next year, and maybe for several years more; (2) long-term debt reduction via cutting spending later—i.e., not cutting spending now; and (3) “tax reform that increases revenues”—i.e., raising taxes, presumably on people who can afford to pay them.

This “we” of Friedman’s, the “we” that more or less shares that three-point agenda, includes, besides Friedman himself, President Obama, the vast bulk of Democratic senators and representatives, and the great majority of economists not employed by the Heritage Foundation. It emphatically does not include the “Tea Party” right and its cowed auxiliary, the Republican Party.

The members of this group believe (or claim to believe) that “short-term jobs stimulus” is wrong in principle, does not work in practice, has already been tried, and has been shown to make things worse, not better. They believe that federal spending should be cut right now, especially spending on things that inject money directly into the economic bloodstream—things like extending support for the unemployed, giving aid to the states so they don’t have to fire cops and teachers, and employing construction workers on projects that don’t require shovels, such as repairing schoolhouses. They believe that poor people are undertaxed: in their view, it’s outrageous that the poorest of the working poor don’t pay income tax. Of course, Republicans might be willing to “compromise” by agreeing to cut taxes on the rich. That’s the one thing they’re always willing to do, no matter what the condition of the economy.

Obama has proved over and over, as in the debt-limit horror show, that he is willing—all too willing—to compromise. The Republicans have proved that they are not. They are re-proving it at the moment by again threatening a government shutdown, this time by holding disaster relief hostage.

Do they truly believe that Keynes didn’t know what he was talking about? Or that when consumer demand collapses, it is good for public demand to do likewise? Some of them do, perhaps. But all of them are aware that if the economy improves Obama will do better in next year’s election, and that if the economy keeps on tanking he’ll do worse. As they showed during the debt-limit “crisis” they created, they see a nice upside to economic disaster. Many of them argued that default wouldn’t be that big a deal, that it was all just scare talk. Were they—are they—ignorant, or just unfathomably, cynically willing to precipitate national, international, and human catastrophe rather than permit Obama to claim something akin to a “victory”? And does it really matter which?

Friedman is vaguely aware of the problem, but he can’t bear to face up to its true implications. Toward the end of the column he writes:

Do I feel that Republicans have tried to make President Obama fail from Day 1? Yes, I do. And their dabbling with another government shutdown now is pure madness. But the president is not blameless. He walked away from his own Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction commission, which still could be the foundation for a sane Grand Bargain.

Most important, Mr. Obama is in charge. He is going to be held most responsible by history for what happens and therefore he needs to take the lead in getting the leaders of both parties back to the Grand Bargaining table.

If one is a spokesman for the sensible center, one must be even-handed, mustn’t one?

On the one hand, the Republicans are lunatics dedicated above all to destroying the Obama Presidency.

On the other hand, Obama didn’t endorse all the provisions of the Simpson-Bowles report.*

See? They’re equally bad.

Which is another way of saying that they’re equally good. Which means that if they could just reason together in good faith, with a readiness to compromise their ideological preferences for the sake of the common good, all would be well.

Except that, as Friedman can’t help implicitly acknowledging, they’re not equally bad and equally good—not remotely. One side rationally understands (and fears) the consequences of inaction and is demonstrably willing to compromise. The other side irrationally dismisses (and might even welcome) those consequences and is demonstratively unwilling to compromise.

We don’t know whether, someday, “history” will hold Obama most responsible for what happens. What we do know—and on this point the “we” is everybody—is that, next year, voters will hold Obama most responsible. And we know that even among voters who think that Obama and the Republican leadership are both responsible but Obama less so, many will vote against him because he will be on the ballot everywhere. “The Republican leadership,” an abstraction both faceless and hydra-headed, won’t be.

The true, underlying, and presumably unconscious logic of Friedman’s analysis is that compromise between a side that is insane and unwilling to compromise and a side that is sane and willing to compromise is in fact impossible just now and will continue to be impossible for some time to come. For Obama, a Grand Bargain, which is to say a Grand Compromise, is not currently an option. His real choice is between a Grand Surrender and a Grand Fight.

I know which of the two I want him to choose. I hope Tom Friedman would have him make the same choice.

*Never mind that Obama might have “walked away” from the Simpson-Bowles plan because he knew that embracing it would have instantly turned it into the Obama plan, thereby rendering it as radioactive for Republicans as “Obamacare” or cap-and-trade. If, as Friedman says (and I doubt), Bowles-Simpson “still could be the foundation for a sane Grand Bargain,” that’s because Obama walked away from it.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.